Saturday Night Conspiracy Theory: Assassination

Potential hit man?

The Republican Party sure has changed. The GOP was once as anti-Semitic as it's now anti-Hispanic and anti-African American. And it was certainly the anti-Zionist party. Now, of course, fealty to Israel means more in GOP politics than fealty to America. When Dick Durbin (D-IL), today one of Israel's staunchest friends in the U.S. Senate, ran for Congress in southern Illinois in 1982 and beat longtime Republican incumbent Paul Findley, there was an awful lot of Israel-friendly money sloshing around in the campaign, all of it going towards defeating the virulently anti-Israeli Republican, Findley.

Today Findlay is 91, living quietly-- and sometimes not so quietly-- in Jacksonville, Illinois. I'm guessing he's rooting for Ron Paul and is horrified at the prospect of a Sheldon Adelson-Gingrich presidency. Last night when I was driving home, I heard Mike Malloy reading a blogpost by Alison Weir from Rock The Truth about an alleged Mossad assassination plot against George H.W. Bush. There was a dual goal: getting rid of the hated Bush, who was pressuring Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, and the installation of a new-breed Republican-- a nitwit apocalyptic Likud shill-- as president of the United States, namely Dan Quayle. That website is, to put it mildly, consumed with conspiracy theories, so I got home and looked around to see if I could find any legitimate confirmation of the plot.

"Legitimate" comes down to the degree of legitimacy you would confer on former Republican congressmen Findley and Pete McCloskey. Here's a report Findley wrote in 1992 about the plot, which appears to be the basis of the Weir claims that so animated Mike Malloy.

In Washington, [Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir] fumed against Bush's selection of the time and place for the next round of Arab-Israeli meetings and tried to reschedule them to his own convenience. He declared that his government will not be pushed around by any other nation, even its chief benefactor, the United States.

These aggravations to a president's good nature, serious as they are, cannot be the only problems weighing heavily on Bush's mind. No American president, and especially George Bush, can wisely put out of mind a far more serious threat to his presidency, the question of personal survival.

As long as he remains president, George Bush will be the center of controversy and, therefore, personally at risk. Despite the endeavors of the Secret Service, the agency whose primary purpose is to protect the president of the United States from harm, no occupant of the office can be effectively shielded from danger.

The Secret Service has special reason for concern at this point in George Bush's career. Before Bush headed for the opening day of the peace conference in Madrid, the Secret Service received a warning that elements of Israel's spy operation-- the Mossad-- might put Bush's life in danger.

The danger was first expressed by Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent, to a group of Canadian parliamentarians. After four years' service, Ostrovsky had left the Mossad in protest against its methods and had written the book By Way of Deception, exposing Israel's spy operations in intimate detail.

Ostrovsky told the Canadians that the Mossad, not the elected political establishment, is the real engine of policy in Israel. He added ominously that secret intelligence he had been receiving suggested strongly that Mossad's hatred of Bush-- and support for Vice President Dan Quayle-- may lead to an attempt on the president's life. Quayle, always popular with Jewish groups, is regarded by Israel as much more sympathetic to its problems than Bush.

Ostrovsky told the group that he feared for his own safety and was under Mossad surveillance.

This astounding information was relayed by one of those attending the Canadian meeting to Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey, my former colleague in Congress. McCloskey, an attorney, is my associate on the board of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based organization that focuses on Middle East policy. He was recently named by Bush to the National and Community Service Commission.

Alarmed for the safety of his longtime friend, George Bush, McCloskey flew to Ottawa for a face-to-face interview with the former Mossad agent.

Ostrovsky impressed McCloskey as a patriotic Zionist who believes the Mossad is out of control. Ostrovsky told him the present leadership of the Mossad wants "to do everything possible to preserve a state of war between Israel and its neighbors, assassinating President Bush, if necessary." He said a public relations campaign is already underway in both Israel and the United States to "prepare public acceptance of Dan Quayle as president."

After lengthy discussion during which he became convinced that Ostrovsky was "real" and telling the truth, McCloskey took the next flight to Washington. There he relayed the information to the Secret Service and State Department, receiving mixed reactions to Ostrovsky's reliability. An officer of the Navy Department dismissed him simply as a "traitor to Israel."

Presumably, Malloy (and Weir) decided to bring this up because of the recent column by Andrew Adler, publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, suggesting that Israel might "have to" assassinate President Obama. Apparently extreme right-wing forces in Israel like Biden almost as much as they once liked Quayle. I'd keep deranged (and violent) Florida Representative Allen West away from the President... just in case.